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Modeling Clausal Complementation for a Grammar Engineering Resource

Paper · 2019 · Olga Zamaraeva, Kristen Howell and Emily M. Bender

Summary

The paper extends the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a toolkit that automatically creates a starter precision grammar for any language from a user's answers to a typological questionnaire. The authors added a library for clausal complements in object function: declarative, object, and full-proposition complements. The analyses draw on a survey of the typological literature and are formulated in the DELPH-IN Joint Reference Formalism (a variant of HPSG) with MRS as the semantic representation. The library supports several ways of marking a subordinate clause: a complementizer, a special verb form (nominalization, mood, aspect), and a change in word order, including extraposition of the subordinate clause to the end. The new library is integrated with the existing modules for morphotactics, tense-aspect-mood, nominalization, and word order. It was developed on five languages and on artificial test languages. It was then evaluated on five languages from other families that had not been used during development. On these languages, the grammars parsed 88% of the grammatical sentences with no overgeneration. The work matters because a grammar without subordinate constructions does not cover a large portion of real texts. Without them, it is also impossible to test whether analyses of simple sentences extend to more complex ones.

Key points

  • The resource consists of a new page of the web questionnaire, new types for the customization system, and changes to existing Grammar Matrix types. The code and test suites are freely available.
  • The development languages are Russian, German, Tagalog, Lango, and Turkish. On these, as well as on a sample of 50 combinations of questionnaire parameters, coverage is 100% and overgeneration is 0%.
  • Evaluation on languages not used during development: Jalkunan, Paresi-Haliti, Yakima Sahaptin, Modern Hebrew, and Wangkangurru. Overall coverage is 88%, with no spurious parses.
  • Jalkunan has the worst result (4 of 8 sentences). This language has a strategy unknown to the authors: a placeholder pronoun remains in the middle of the sentence, while the subordinate clause itself is extraposed to the end. In addition, a bug was found in the interaction with the word order module in sentences with auxiliary verbs.
  • For now, the library does not cover subject and interrogative clausal complements, shared subjects, parataxis, or infinitival and participial complements. These are planned for future work.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Syntax & grammar formalisms · 214 works

Cite

Cite as Olga Zamaraeva, Kristen Howell and Emily M. Bender. 2019. Modeling Clausal Complementation for a Grammar Engineering Resource. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2019.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7275/dygn-c796

@inproceedings{zamaraeva2019modeling,
  title = {{Modeling Clausal Complementation for a Grammar Engineering Resource}},
  author = {Olga Zamaraeva, Kristen Howell and Emily M. Bender},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2019},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7275/dygn-c796},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7275/dygn-c796}
}

References

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